Boutique Language Geek Thread of Imperial Grandeur

[RDCanecutter 26458]

12 hours ago, gsoda3 said:

@RDCanecutter I want to improve my conversational french. I took it for 3 years in HS but that was 25 years ago. Any suggestions on TV shows, books, or podcasts that are basic enough to understand and interesting enough to hold my attention?

Hi, aren't you in Austin? I would get around actual French speakers, there ought to be some sort of Cercle Français semi-attached to UT or similar where you can get a belt of wine in you and listen to real people jabber, and jump in yourself as old memories come back to life.

These guys need volunteers so if you did anything for them, and told them you wanted to speak French, I bet you'd be in like Flynn.

https://www.afaustin.org/volunteer

They would also know about any events you could attend.

For books I'd suggest getting into French comic books. Most of them are written for adults, and even if the language isn't dumbed down, you have a picture right there to give context.

One of my favorite author/artists is Jacques Tardi. If you want wrist-slashing grim, get one of his WW1 comics like C'etait la guerre des tranchees (it was the war of the trenches) now also in English so you could get doubly-depressed reading both versions. A little lighter, still very noir, are his adaptations of Leo Malet's jazz-age detective Nestor Burma. Great atmosphere and street-by-street detailed views of walking around Paris puzzling out mysteries.

Another favorite is the Louis La Guigne series, about a guy who lives on the margins from WW1 to the 1930s, traveling around the world getting in and out of trouble. From maybe the 80s but probably easy to find.

The language in these two is not simplified, but you can pick up some good stuff and the stories are interesting.

My last method of getting decent at a language is to have the radio banging in that language all day in the background. People don't seem to believe me on this, but it helped me "walk through the wall" in Spanish*. No doubt there are an infinite number available in all styles online.

 

So tldr, Canecutter Conversation Method = Get around French people, read good French comic books, and play French radio in the background.

 

*The "walk through the wall" moment is when you wonder why everybody suddenly switched to English, but they didn't. Usually follows several months of random unplanned exposure.

Edited September 26, 2023 by RDCanecutter

[gsoda3 3274]

@RDCanecutter those are GREAT suggestions thanks.  the most realistic for me would be the comic books, i'll see if i can find any.  thanks again!

[atomheartbevo 89757]

@RDCanecutter I came across this, you may find it amusing

 

[RDCanecutter 26458]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

@RDCanecutter I came across this, you may find it amusing

 

OHHHH yeahhhh. If anything the reply should have been longer and involved more if/then/unless loops.

As far as I know, I have very little German ancestry. But I look a way that makes Germans think I am German. I think I would have to taze one of them to change their minds. The practical effect is that I would scrape together a simple question like "Is this the train to ____?" or "I'd like that one" (pointing to food on grill,) and invariably I'd get a wall of text including options, lots of options.

German friends would say "They're just trying to help." The German sausage-griller guy wanted me to have all the needed info to live a good life.

A French sausage-griller guy would have thought: "Zees beeg Boche wants zis one? Well let him eet zis one. Eef 'e does not know zat ze ozzer one ees bettair? C'est pas de ma faute, quoi."

[ShaggyBevo RIP 3868]

Kamehameha School has worked with Duo Lingo and you can now learn Hawaiian.

 

Edited September 29, 2023 by ShaggyBevo RIP

[SimonBolivar 10958]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/04/world/europe/moldova-gagauz-languages-soviet-union.html

 

Quote

He has published collections of poetry, written more than 20 books, as well as plays, translated works by foreign literary giants like Moliere and is rated as a master of his native language.

 

His prodigious output, however, is not matched by the size of his readership. His children can’t understand a word he has written.

 

Todur Zanet writes in Gagauz, an obscure Turkic tongue used by so few people that, the writer worries, the main value of his literary output probably lies with future scholars interested in dead languages. “At least they will have something interesting to study,” he said.

 

“Our language is dying and within two or three generations it will be dead,” Mr. Zanet, 65, said in an interview in Comrat, the capital of his home region of Gagauzia, an autonomous ethnic enclave in the former Soviet republic of Moldova.

Others are less pessimistic and note that while used routinely at home and work by only a few thousand people, Gagauz is similar to Turkish and several other Turkic languages widely used in parts of the former Soviet Union like Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

The Gagauz language might be small and shrinking, said Gullu Karanfil, a linguist and poet who teaches Gagauz and Turkish at Comrat State University, but, “it is part of a big linguistic family” with more than 300 million people, more than the number of Russian speakers worldwide. “It will not die,” she insisted.

Turkey, Russia and the United States each fund small centers at the university to promote their own tongues and by extension influence, a rivalry rooted in post-Soviet language politics, a particularly pernicious legacy of Moscow’s previous rule.

Since Moscow’s empire began to unravel in the late 1980s, heated arguments and even wars have broken out over languages.

The conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan that again erupted in violence two weeks ago, began in 1988 after Armenian writers complained that the region had no textbooks or broadcasting in their language. That grievance quickly fueled wider demands for cultural and political self-determination.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent his military into Ukraine in February last year after claiming that Russian-speakers there needed to be protected from Ukrainians intent on creating a mono-linguistic Ukrainian-speaking “Nazi” state.

That was not true but it reflected the emotional power of language loyalties across vast expanses of territory that, in the Soviet era, had been bound together, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, by the hegemonic sway of Russian.

Ignat Cazmali, a former Soviet military officer and historian from Gagauzia, founded a museum in his home village of Avdarma, east of Comrat, to try and untangle the settlement’s often painful journey through periods of Russian, Romanian, Soviet and now Moldovan rule, each of which had its own dominant language.

Soviet communism, he said, “was never about internationalism but an ethnocracy,” a system designed to ensure the dominance of ethnic Russians and their language while playing a multitude of smaller ethnic groups and languages off against each other.

The result was a matryoshka nesting doll of mutually reinforcing linguistic and ethnic grievances. The Soviet Union contained 15 different ethnically based republics, the biggest of which was Russia. When it broke apart, smaller dolls inside like Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia — and the minorities they in turn contained, like the Gagauz — spilled out and clamored for the primacy of their own languages.

Under pressure from huge street protests asserting the identity of Moldova’s Romanian-speaking majority, the Soviet republic’s mostly Russian-speaking communist legislature in 1989 declared “Moldovan” — meaning Romanian — the “state language” and relegated Russian to a “language of interethnic communication.” Two years later Moldova declared independence.

The rise of Moldovan nationalism alarmed minority groups like the Gagauz, which mostly spoke Russian and feared falling victim to the identity politics of Moldova’s Romanian-speaking majority. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine had similar fears about losing out to newly empowered Ukrainian speakers.

Few Gagauz people by this time spoke their own native tongue. It had been taught in local schools for a brief period starting in 1958, but was then dropped as Moscow accelerated a drive to impose Russian. But fear of rising nationalism among the Moldovan majority set off a parallel push by Gagauz intellectuals to revive and assert their own language.

Todur Marinoglu, a Gagauz language activist in the 1980s, recalled that this immediately attracted the attention of the K.G.B., which infiltrated the movement to sideline activists genuinely interested in the local language and promote others mostly interested in keeping Moldova within the Soviet Union.

Mr. Marinoglu was placed under surveillance and taken in for questioning on suspicion of being a “pan-Turkic” militant in cahoots with Turkey, a member of NATO. He insisted that his only real concern was reviving his native tongue.

Realizing that the Soviet Union was falling apart, local communist elites in Gagauzia jumped on the Gagauz language revival bandwagon, at least briefly, though many did not speak it. They supported the establishment in 1988 of Ana Sozu, which translates loosely as Mother Tongue, the region’s first newspaper entirely in Gagauz. Mr. Zanet, the writer, became its editor.

A year later, they declared Gagauzia an independent state, ostensibly to protect the Gagauz language but mainly to protect their own position against Romanian-speaking Moldovan nationalists.

The breakaway state folded in 1994 after Moldova agreed to grant the region autonomy. This entity has been dominated since by politicians who all speak Russian and have little or no knowledge of either Gagauz or Romanian, despite a legal requirement that all officials in the autonomous government know the local Turkic tongue.

“There were never any official documents written in Gagauz,” Mr. Marinoglu, the former activist said, “so nothing changed. Everything is in Russian. This is the tomb of our own language.”

Of the 45 secondary schools in the region, 42 teach in Russian, two in Romanian and one in both. They offer classes in Gagauz as a second language but many parents want their children to focus on mastering Russian, a marker of education and social status.

Natalia Cristeva, the head of the regional education department, said she was working to promote Gagauz; in 2021 she started a program of trilingual kindergartens, with children required to speak Russian, Romanian and Gagauz on different days.

She said it had come as a big shock when the United Nations in 2010 declared Gagauz an endangered language — one of more than 2,600 languages, out of a total of 6,700 spoken worldwide, now classified as being at risk of extinction.

As a child, Ms. Cristeva spoke Gagauz at home with her father but, after going to school in Russian and working entirely in Russian throughout her career, she now struggles to speak her native tongue fluently.

Efforts to keep the language alive secured what should have been a big boost in 2018 when, after months of heated debate, the regional parliament passed a new law to “widen the sphere of the use of Gagauz,” which included the requirement that officials know how to speak it.

Elena Karamit, a co-sponsor of the legislation and the director of Mr. Cazmali’s museum in Avdarma, said the new rules have been patchily enforced.

“If people on top spoke Gagauz and started using it in public they would give an example. But they all speak Russian,” she said in an interview, conducted in Russian.

Irina Konstantinova, the Gagauz-speaking director of a local branch of the Moldovan Academy of Sciences, said the requirement had at least helped lift a stigma attached to Gagauz since Soviet times.

Her office has developed a dozen text books for civil servants who want to learn the language, children’s books and a series of Russian-Gagauz dictionaries covering specialist vocabularies for fields like medicine and trade.

Mr. Zanet, the writer and newspaper editor, has kept his tiny-circulation journal alive thanks to support from Turkey’s overseas development agency but is still gloomy about the survival of his native tongue.

“There is no future for small languages,” he said. “The future belongs to big languages — English, Russian, Chinese and Turkish.”

 

 

[RDCanecutter 26458]

Hit my 100-day streak on Duolingo yesterday, Scottish Gaelic everyday, plus a couple days poking around Irish when I got bored.

I feel like I'm maybe at the 102 level in a language class, if I'd paid attention in a language class instead of drawing cartoons.

I don't try to win the Duolingo leaderboard game, I just crank it out rock-solid 4 or 5 lessons a day.

NEAT THINGS ABOUT SCOTTISH GAELIC:

I see lots of Norse, French, and Latin vocabulary hiding in there, similar to English. No surprise given the influences. Mostly the same as Irish, with some spelling differences and meaning shifts-- the Scottish word "to speak" comes off as "to brawl" in Irish.

"Bod ort" (sounds like Bo Torsht) means "a dick on you." Can be used like "Fuck it," or maybe literally. "Tha mo thon goirt" (Ha mo hohn gorshch) is "my ass is sore."

Apparently there's some Pictish influence. Supposedly the Picts spoke a language more closely related to Welsh, and Picts lived everywhere the Scotti settled when they came over from Ireland and they boinked and had bebbies. The Scottish verb system is simpler than the Irish one, and I am told (by people in Youtube videos) that the original Irish system altered in Scottish to match up with a Welsh-like one thanks to these Picts.

(Though why it couldn't have come from the Similar-to-Welsh extinct Cumbrian language, spoken in SW Scotland in the Kingdom of Strathclyde, I know not.)

I mentioned that I sometimes snuck over to Irish Duolingo. Mostly able to puzzle it out, probably mostly because I'm just a language nerd rather than any pan-Celtic comprehension. The vibe of the two courses is different: the Irish speakers sound like humorless schoolteachers trying to enforce discipline, while the Scottish ones sound happy to see you and they're pouring you a drink. Only a handful of contributors to each course, but that's how it struck me.

SCOTTISH GAELIC IN MY LIFE NOW:

As stated before, I speak it with my dog, and work on Duolingo in our den with my wife playing whatever game she's into. I will shout the answers either in Gaelic, or my best Rob Roy rendition of English. As a result, my wife now knows enough to shout out some answers first if I get slack.

There is a subculture here of people who know a little, and I have drawn them out with artwork inscribed with Gaelic phrases. Then we yell it back and forth like savages. Picked up some commissions from the bagpiper crowd. But the main thing it's fun.

[Patricio Swayze 17058]

In order of fluency:

Portuguese
Portuñol/Portunhol
Spanish

I can count to 10 in Japanese. That’s about it.

[RDCanecutter 26458]

[RDCanecutter 26458]

Hit Day 200 on Duolingo today. My Gaelic is what you'd expect from a B student in 2nd-year language class-- hunks of simple stuff that I've got down pat, other vast tracts of Terra Incognita where I don't even know what I don't know. So far I've learned present tense, past, some kinda combo future/habitual thing, and a few commands. The difference in those is often just switching out one word.

I didn't think I had learned much, but the other day I was driving across town and wanted to see if I could describe things I saw. I vomited out a surprising string of Gaelic, not saying I could cover everything, but I could keep a conversation going. So if you were in the area and thought you heard Rob Roy's ghost road-ragin, mighta been me.

[RDCanecutter 26458]

After months of studying Gaelic (my wife and I will slip into it, as well as talking to our dog) I met a guy from Inverness who grew up speaking it. He hit me with a firehose of it, but I could figure it out. His is different from mine, which he clocked as from the Isles. I guess that's where the Duolingo instructors are from.

I guess if Britain has a different dialect of English every 50 miles, why not with Gaelic.

Now I will nerd-laugh until milk comes out my nose.

[ajax 2620]

Within the next couple of years, I need to get to a conversational fluency in luxembourgish. Why? It's a long, uninteresting story but it's a necessity. 

But I have to devote time and resources to learning a language that is so infrequently used that even people in Luxembourg don't use it. 

As of right now there is a grand total of one show on Netflix that uses luxembourgish.

[RDCanecutter 26458]

26 minutes ago, ajax said:

Within the next couple of years, I need to get to a conversational fluency in luxembourgish. Why? It's a long, uninteresting story but it's a necessity. 

But I have to devote time and resources to learning a language that is so infrequently used that even people in Luxembourg don't use it. 

As of right now there is a grand total of one show on Netflix that uses luxembourgish.

Now see this is the kind of crazy shit that makes the crowd stand up and roar. Do it!

 

[ajax 2620]

19 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

Now see this is the kind of crazy shit that makes the crowd stand up and roar. Do it!

 

I have no choice.

But I'm stoked because I just found out that there are luxembourgish dubs of The Simpsons out there somewhere. Now if I could only get access to some of those episodes. 

 

 

[RDCanecutter 26458]

21 hours ago, ajax said:

I have no choice.

But I'm stoked because I just found out that there are luxembourgish dubs of The Simpsons out there somewhere. Now if I could only get access to some of those episodes. 

 

 

Cool stuff. German and Italian still have different dialects every few miles (Not implying that Luxembourg is German-- let's call it Holy Roman Empire) unlike the French, who have been doing their best to murder all their dialects.

To my untrained ear it reminds me of Schwabisch or Alsatian. Probably wrong though. Moien.

[Armybrat 40856]

On 4/8/2024 at 4:11 PM, ajax said:

Within the next couple of years, I need to get to a conversational fluency in luxembourgish. Why? It's a long, uninteresting story but it's a necessity. 

But I have to devote time and resources to learning a language that is so infrequently used that even people in Luxembourg don't use it. 

As of right now there is a grand total of one show on Netflix that uses luxembourgish.

My Canadian friend moved to Austin from Luxembourg where he had worked for eBay for several years.

I’ll have to ask him if he knew anything about the local lingo and how did he converse with the native residents.

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

On 4/8/2024 at 4:11 PM, ajax said:

Within the next couple of years, I need to get to a conversational fluency in luxembourgish. Why? It's a long, uninteresting story but it's a necessity. 

But I have to devote time and resources to learning a language that is so infrequently used that even people in Luxembourg don't use it. 

As of right now there is a grand total of one show on Netflix that uses luxembourgish.

Did you ever visit this YT channel? If you click on the "videos" segment, she has a lot of videos about "conversating."

https://www.youtube.com/@LuxembourgishwithAnne/videos

 

Here's one:

 

[ajax 2620]

1 hour ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Did you ever visit this YT channel? If you click on the "videos" segment, she has a lot of videos about "conversating."

I have, thanks. I've also been listening to her podcast. She seems to be the only channel on YouTube teaching this language, unlike other languages that have countless channels.

[RDCanecutter 26458]

Getting close to 300 days in Gaelic, and have met at least 3 other people locally interested in it-- one Duolingo dude like me, a bagpiper who appears at any vaguely Scottish event, and an actual Highlander from Inverness who grew up speaking it.

I feel that the time is ripe to start a club for us and any randos who might pitch in. I have teaching experience, but am not fluent enough to teach this. We'd have to count on most interested parties having zero knowledge, so maybe I could help them get rolling, and ask our Real Scottish Dude to guide us further.

There have to be some drinking songs out there.

[davidg 4038]

Xiaomanyc dropping some Gaelic with the natives of Uist 

 

[RDCanecutter 26458]

12 hours ago, davidg said:

Xiaomanyc dropping some Gaelic with the natives of Uist 

 

Pretty cool. I could cover the subtitles and follow the simple stuff, but when it takes off in a random direction it's like being on the end in a game of crack-the-whip.

Odd that he'd say it's as different from English as Japanese, couldn't have meant that literally because there are tons of common vocab, sometimes borrowed, sometimes deep from thousands of years ago, or from midway sources like French or Norse that also influenced English.

[RDCanecutter 26458]

Bit the bullet and signed up for a short Gaelic course at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, a school on the Isle of Skye that seems to be the center for training teachers and others who want to become fluent.

No airfare to pay because it's online. Main adventure is training myself to start waking up at Oh-Dark-Thirty to sync up with morning classes in Scotland.

They have 8 or more levels, I picked Level 3. They sent me the materials and its a mix of familiar and new, so maybe I guessed right about the level.

In the meantime I continue Duolingo, as well as poke around reading about Old Irish so I can maybe internalize why Gaelic does weird little things it does.

[RDCanecutter 26458]

Had the first online class today, didn't I.

Me and a few retired ladies, mostly from Scotland. Everybody nice enough.

Instructor is awesome. Could star as Gandalf/Dumbledore/Yoda with a glorious white beard.

He's patient and thoroughly knowledgeable, I noted down random insights that would have taken me months on my own, if then.

In our everybody-get-to-know-each-other I mentioned that Mom was a McFamousClan to explain why I had grown up bombarded by faux American Scottishness, But Instructor was "McFamousClan? I used to visit your castle that they rebuilt after the Royal Navy blew it up because they were tired of your Jacobite Ways." Dammit. I have a CASTLE. And JACOBITE WAYS. My problems in 8th grade math class suddenly make sense.

Gaelic word of the day: Seadh (pronounced "Shugh" but if you get it wrong would a man on a gallopin horse notice the difference? No.) It's the amazing get-out-of-jail word, if you've not been paying attention to what the other guy's been saying, and you have no idea what to say, just drop in Seadh, it's like "man" or "I hear you." You can totally zone out. Seadh.

[SimonBolivar 10958]

@RDCanecutter How has it been going?

[RDCanecutter 26458]

2 hours ago, SimonBolivar said:

@RDCanecutter How has it been going?

Tha mi gu dòigheil! Up to about Day 412 on Duolingo. I have obtained spousal and community (her friends and sister) approval to trek to Scotland and take a longer course. Or maybe to Nova Scotia, they have a school there as well. Actually seems easier to get to Scotland.

About a week ago I started mixing in a little Dutch between Gaelic lessons after hearing a linguist say that he studies Dutch because it's Silly English. What I've seen so far is 3/4 interchangeable with English. Made me realize that my cousin's Dutch husband isn't really speaking English, he just pops in the occasional English word and otherwise putters along in Dutch. I still close out every session going back to Gaelic.

[InkaUtexas 26017]

Cono, porque putas no vi este thread? Ma jebi ga.

Learned to cuz real well in Bosnian. Still love to use it when I am pissed off at someone and they have no idea what is going on

Latin America is great for slang. Puta in El Salvador is used in almost every way possible.

[SimonBolivar 10958]

8 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Cono, porque putas no vi este thread? Ma jebi ga.

Learned to cuz real well in Bosnian. Still love to use it when I am pissed off at someone and they have no idea what is going on

Latin America is great for slang. Puta in El Salvador is used in almost every way possible.

At first I thought, "sweet I know Bosnian" then reread your post.

[InkaUtexas 26017]

15 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

At first I thought, "sweet I know Bosnian" then reread your post.

some parts of Bosnian were easy to grasp with Spanish and Portuguese. Dajteme is Dame. A truly blended language.